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First experience with Google Friend Connect on my WordPress blog

December 5, 2008 By Dan Thornton

You may have spotted an interesting new widget on the right side of the site, under the search box. And you’d probably have spotted it’s an example of Google Friend Connect, released into the wild!

If you haven’t heard about Google and Facebooks rival attempts to provide a way to carry a single identity around the internet, engaging with communities at each stopping point, then I’d be a little surprised! Facebook Connect is also now available to anyone, having been opened to anyone today, after a period of testing on a limited number of sites. The third option is all of this is OpenID which has been around a while. The idea of not being tied to a single company is appealing, but it all honesty, I’ve often found OpenID can be a bit of a pain as a user if you forget which site logins count, or have to go through a creation process. It shouldn’t be hard, and the individual steps aren’t rocket science, but for some reason I’ve always found it a pain

Installing Google Friend Connect on a WordPress Blog:

Whereas the instructions for Facebook Connect involve creating HTML files in specific locations and will take a little bit of confidence, installing Google Friend Connect on a host WordPress Blog is incredibly easy. Once you’ve been accepted to use it, you download two html files, which you then upload to the top level of your hosted blog. Then once Google has checked it can find them, you’ve given access to the limited number of widgets already available – which you can install by copying and pasting the code in the ‘Text Widget’ option in your WordPress Dashboard.

In fact, the only thing that slowed me up was adjusting the height and width to make sure it fitted the right hand column!

Initial Thoughts:

I spent the morning reading the comprehensive look at Google Friend Connect by Neville Hobson and took the chance to try it out from a pure user’s perspective – it took me a couple of seconds to work out how to use my standard Google profile – strangely it isn’t the default – and also how to add my first friend – Robin Grant from We Are Social had turned up moments before me!

All well and good, but the interaction available by the community widget is pretty limited to adding someone – there was mention of being able to see them across all sites,but having added the widget here, I can’t see any way to contact, invite or interact with Robin and get him to come and display his proud membership of TheWayoftheWeb. (He might turn up if I tag this post with his name!)

There is also a comments widget which I may have a play with shortly – the question is whether that detracts from comments on the end of each individual post, and leads to something with no context – or whether it provides a place for general comments and communication which benefits the site as a whole, and doesn’t interfere with specific responses.

There’s also a review and rate gadget, which looks quite useful, but not really applicable for this blog unless I want people to be rating the entire site, and a very simple demo game.

I know there’s going to be a lot more coming, and the fact it works so flawlessly in the current basic iteration is definitely a good thing – I’ve just got a lot of questions about what will be happening in the future, and how it will help more interaction and connectivity to benefit the site. How do I use it to make friends with people via other instances, and then suggest they might like to visit, for example?

There are widgets which do that already, such as MyBlogLog, (owned by Yahoo) which displays any registered users in the order they visit. The main difference is that any interaction is done via the MyBlogLog site, which works OK, but it isn’t effective to ask me to leave the site I’m enjoying to go and connect, and then come back again. Whoever wins the ID war out of the three main players, I suspect services like MyBlogLog will be the first to be caught in the crossfire.

Big implications for sites with registration and data revenues

The other area of interest for me will be around data – obviously a site like mine doesn’t require membership or monetise data – but a lot of mid to large sized websites are using data capture as a significant revenue stream. If everyone is using Google Friend Connect as their preferred community, and it’s not available on a large site, it may stop them from wanting to interact – and if it is available, there’s currently no real data available that I can see in the administration area, aside from total number of members.

This could leave a lot of sites in a very tricky position – do they accept the loss of data to allow community, or do they risk isolation by trying to keep a valuable revenue stream?

And they’ll need to decide quickly, because Facebook has a large audience as an incentive, plus integration into Facebook news feeds etc. Meanwhile Google not only has a Googlopoly on search, but most smaller sites and blogs are incredibly familiar and at home with Google Adsense, meaning it’s a familiar working relationship.

If anyone has any details on the data side of things for Google or Facebook’s services, I’d be really interested to find out more.

Testing Magpie advertising within Tweets…

November 28, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’ve seen a bit of feedback about new Twitter advertising service Magpie, which places paid advertising in your messages on a user-defined ratio – e.g. you can choose anywhere between posting one normal message then an add will appear, up to posting 200 messages before the advert posts.

Advertising is flagged by #magpie or a custom message within each advertising tweet. And you can pre-approve adverts, or allow them to autopost.

I’ve currently got the radio set at 10 normal posts before an advert appears, as I’m a fairly frequent poster. I’ve also asked people in advance for their thoughts, and a couple of people have said they’ll unfollow anyone who even starts using Magpie, whereas the majority have either said they don’t really mind, or they’re fine if it’s just a test.

In all honesty, there’s going to be monetisation of Twitter at some point, and the most logical place for any type of advertising-based revenue is around either the content or search functionality, because those are the areas which get attention from users.

For all we know, some of the growing number of services could be approved by the Twitter team behind the scenes as a way to experiment without alienating any users!

There’s a few reasons for testing:

I hate writing about things I haven’t tried for myself
My Tweeting and 140char were both started with aims other than making money, but at the same time, I don’t really want to be running a blog that costs me money at the moment.
Monetisation will happen for Twitter, and this is one viable method in terms of getting attention. So it’s worth investigating now to be able to provide an educated response if it’s adopted as an official monetisation method.

But in the meantime, here’s the figures for my test:

Magpie started: 28/11/2008. Current followers: 1579.

And if you’re going to sign up to test it or use it yourself, why not help out 140char by using our referral link? http://be-a-magpie.com/bkq4mw

Making money with Twitter backgrounds

November 19, 2008 By Dan Thornton

The background of your Twitter profile seems to be a fertile place for people experimenting with making money from microblogging. I’ve previously written about individuals auctioning their Twitter profiles for charity and raising $1002, and also advertising service Twittad, which allows advertisers to place adverts on your Twitter profile (I’m currently testing the service – Twittad itself is advertising on my profile at $44).

Now a very different service is seeking to make money from Twitter profiles. TwitterImage.com offers custom images for your Twitter profile. At the moment there’s a special offer running with a free design if you have 2000+ followers and allow a small credit line for the service in your background. If you’ve got less than 2000 followers, then there’s a 25% off the normal price of $100. For your $75 you get a custom background, and one minor revision. Or you can pay the full price of $100 if you think you’ll need more than one design or revision.

For example:

I wish them well with the service, but I have to admit to having my doubts about the viability of it. While I understand that designers need to be reimbursed for their talents, how many Twitter users would value their background enough to spend $75 or $100 on it?

Obviously you can insert your contact and bio details into the image – but there is a link for an about page on your site etc. And experimenting with your own imagery costs nothing if you use an open source image editor like Gimp, and have the time to play around with it, plus you still need to supply any imagery you want to be used.

And then there’s the issue that you’d be paying more to have a custom Twitter background than I’m aware of any advertiser paying – so if they’re not seeing the value yet, do you think there’s a huge advantage in having a custom made Twitter background? And are you valuing it at $75-$100?

What wouldn’t Google do?

October 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’m looking forward to seeing the new book by Jeff Jarvis, ‘What Would Google Do‘, where he reverse-engineers Google and applies the learnings to a variety of different industries.

It’ll definitely be interesting, and I certainly mean no disrespect to his work, but as a purely external observer of the big G, it seems like my own version would be the shortest book in history.

What would Google do? Pretty much everything they could – and then see what works, what gets popular, and what they can monetise – The End!

There’s a great case in point emerging as Google experiments in wringing more from Adsense – for example Adsense in Flash games, Adsense in Google Maps, Click-to-buy on Youtube, Adsense in RSS etc, and now an Adsense search box and adverts for pages of Adsense adverts.

Meanwhile they’ve got enough projects on the go to shake a web pointer at in Google Labs. And that doesn’t even list other properties like Orkut. Which, according to a great global map of social networks by Oxyweb (hat tip to Nick O’Neil) is still ruling the roost in India and Brazil.

And then there’s acquisitions. I don’t even know how many they’ve made over recent years, but certainly they include the likes of Blogger, which I still use for some projects and ideas despite preferring WordPress now, and Feedburner.

And if you want to see what happens when a Google acquisition doesn’t result in transformational change to a service (and possibly even a downturn in terms of reliability and usability), just keep an eye on a Twitter Search for Feedburner!

And then there’s Google Analytics, Web Optimizer, Google Reader, Gmail, iGoogle, and I can’t even keep up linking to each product!

‘To me, Google appears to differ from most large companies by being almost liquid or gaseous in slipping itself into whatever shape or gap is necessary to permeate into every part of our digital lives (including mobile). And it does it by doing every possible permutation and leaving what works in place’

I think that probably sums up my approach to answering What Would Google Do? But I’m looking to see what Jeff Jarvis has used for his take in the actual book!

Breaking the habit of broadcast media

October 21, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It’s only when you try and break a long held habit that you realise how much we’re all influenced by the way we’ve always done things. Since starting my efforts to cut down and stop smoking, I’ve managed to get to the point where I only have the occasional cigarette once the family has gone to bed – but it’s the hardest one to drop. And when I get writers block, my intake rapidly goes up because I’ve spent so long finding inspiration by getting outside and getting the hit of nicotine while my brain kicks into gear.

UK newspapers by franckdethier on Flickr (CC Licence)

And I’ve also started to try and challenge the broadcast media habit of trying to get the biggest audience with the least work. For years we’ve focused on audience figures to suggest that by doing the bare minimum, you’ll reach the biggest audience.

Whereas in the modern world, we need to work harder than ever at making as much of what we do remarkable, and to pursue as many opportunities to the maximum as we can. Otherwise we’ll keep finding someone else that does!

It reminds me of a post I read earlier today, which sadly I seem to have misplaced, commenting on the problem facing the A-List of blogging. Namely, the fact that people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are finding it hard to scale to respond on an individual level to every email, post and tweet they receive, and in effect, become mini-broadcasters.

The simple answer is that they still remain increasingly popular because they put in a huge amount of effort to stay more accessible than mainstream media. They don’t have to make time for everyone, but by attempting it as far as possible, it gives hope to those who don’t grab their attention at a particular time. It’s why I count myself fortunate to have had messages from the likes of Chris Anderson and Hugh McLeod, but I don’t bombard them with emails, or suddenly thinkg they’re my best friend and will respond to everything I do – they’ll do it if what I say is interesting and they have the time available.

The other option is to scale it, and for them to find someone as similar as possible, or someone they can trust, to work alongside them.

That’s where broadcast media should be. We still have far more resources than the top bloggers, so why not scale back on the coverage that everyone else is parroting, use link journalism, and focus on becoming closer to the spirit of individual response that blogging has fostered.

After all, it’s what we laud Zappos, Dell and Comcast for doing.

But there is a habit of resisting the idea of putting in that much effort for what will be less profit in total. Despite the fact that everything so far has shown that it’s harder to get similar levels of profit from online audiences as you would in print, radio or TV, and that the only way to really be successful is to aggregate lots and lots of individuals monetisation.

Annoyingly, the great David Armano summed this up far more succinctly.

The Corporate Social Media Curve by David Armano (https://darmano.typepad.com/)

At the point before the curve starts to dip, we need to put in the extra effort to keep that line climbing. Now if only I hadn’t needed a cigarette to think of all this!